Global boiling? Don’t be ridiculous

Almost instantly, media outlets started lecturing readers on how they might help to put a halt to the coming evaporation of our planet. SBS in Australia advised us to ‘Reduce meat intake’, ‘Stop driving cars’ and ‘Cut down on flights’.

In short, stop all the fun stuff; make sacrifices to appease nature’s angry gods. Even self-styled radicals made themselves mouthpieces of the UN’s medieval sermonising. Novara Media instantly embraced ‘global boiling’ as an apt metaphor for the arsonist impact humanity has had on Earth.

Scratch a Marxist these days, find a Malthusian.

Can’t we have just a little critical thinking on the idea of ‘global boiling’? The first thing a rational mind ought to note is that boiling is when liquid turns into vapour. Sorry to be pedantic, but I think the meaning of words is important.

Does anyone really believe our planet is now so fantastically hot that lakes and rivers and seas will shortly start to evaporate? If you don’t – and you shouldn’t, because it’s baloney – then you should not use a phrase like ‘global boiling’.

Indeed, one professor of climate physics rebuked Guterres, mildly, of course, for starting to ‘depart from the underlying scientific evidence’. Indeed. Earth is not boiling, and we shouldn’t say that it is.

There are other reasons to be sceptical of the boiling hysteria. Yes, the weather is hot in parts of Europe, but there have been heatwaves throughout history, long before the dawn of industry.

What’s more, the Greek government says that most of the 667 fires it has experienced over the sweaty past fortnight were started ‘by human hand’.

So those ferocious flames gleefully described by our green elites as Mother Nature’s punishment of mankind were mainly the handiwork of arsonists. Then there’s the fact that cold weather kills far more people than hot weather.

Will the chilly winter months, in which numerous old people will perish, be described by Guterres and his apostles as a global freezing, a New Ice Age? Of course not. There are no propaganda points, no opportunities for modernity-bashing, in fearmongering over cold weather.

Let’s be clear: ‘global boiling’ is not a factual or scientific phrase. Rather, it represents yet another ramping up of the green politics of fear. It’s the latest addition to the already fat dictionary of eco-dread.

Economic inflation isn’t the only problem we face today – there’s threat inflation, too. The catastrophism of climate change in particular is puffed up on pretty much a weekly basis. This is why we’ve gone from ‘climate change’ to ‘climate crisis’ to ‘climate emergency’.

And it’s why we’re now going from global warming to global boiling. Language is used to terrorise the masses, to snap us out of our supposed apathetic coolness on the issue of ‘climate change’ and force us to agree with the cranky elites that the end really is nigh, and it’s our fault.

As the Washington Post said in its coverage of the ‘global boiling’ edict, apocalyptic superlatives can be ‘useful in underlining the importance of [this] issue’. This is a familiar tactic of eco-propagandists.

A few years ago, Extinction Rebellion protested outside the offices of the New York Times to put pressure on it to dump the passive phrase ‘climate change’ in preference for the panic-inducing ‘climate emergency’.

‘Linguistic experts’ have cheered the media’s embrace of catastrophic language because apparently fretful terminology can help to ‘convey to the public an increasingly urgent threat’.

They’re trying to manipulate us. They are using the grammar of Armageddon to cajole us into compliance with the green narrative and its demands for sacrifice in everyday life.

As I argue in my new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto, they want to ‘coerce us into the realm of doom by making us think less about “climate change” and more about climate chaos, climate disaster, even climate apocalypse’.

It is imperative that we resist this linguistic authoritarianism. ‘Global boiling’ isn’t only a ridiculous phrase – it is also an insult to truth, reason and us.

That such a fact-lite, post-scientific, hysterical phrase has been used by the UN, the activist set and the media elites is a reminder that they see the rest of us, the little people, as malleable creatures to be marched this way and that by scary words and warnings of a hellish future.

It’s boiling anger we should feel, for this arrogant crusade of emotional manipulation.